Whoever said CW is dead hasn't tuned during a recent major contest, I worked exactly 100 different countries from a Missouri suburb during the last CQWW CW with 100 watts and a ground mounted 43' vertical from DX Engineering.

20 and 40 were so crowded that some of the juiciest CW DX was more than 120 kHz up from the band's bottom.

New CW ops, especially those with very limited stations, will love 40 CW if they fire up in a major DX contest around midnight local time when stateside competition decreases. If your station really stinks operate on the second night when the DX is begging for Qs.

I used to extensively monitor the Russian Morse code V-beacon near Tashkent years ago when it could be heard short path in our evening and long path in the morning on 7.002 mHz.

I still have tapes of it sending its very rare ID on CW (it had a call believe it or not, RCQ45)

I used to listen to the many other Russina single letter beacons on 40, mostly around 7039. My goal was to DF them using my 4-square and also by using grayline maps. I exchanged emails with hams who were much closer to them.

I never heard any brief pronounced peak at precisely SR or SS on RCQ45, a beacon that probably used an omnidirectional antenna.

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